"Foxconn Mulls Putting Up Factories in United States"

Foxcon TV

Foxconn, one of the world’s largest employers thanks to the booming demand for iPhones and iPads, is reportedly planning to open manufacturing facilities in the United States.

The move is welcoming news to the US, which remains reeling from recession. Foxconn is considering putting up factories in Detroit and Los Angeles, but it would also have to revise how the company conducts its operations. America does not have armies of workers as young as 14 years old, earning a few hundred dollars a month, and living in dormitories, unlike in Foxconn’s facilities in China that manually assemble iPhones and iPads.

Foxconn’s Chinese facilities has also been dogged with worker suicides, industrial accidents, and riots, which have become a source of embarrassment for its largest client.

Sources say that Foxconn’s American factories will specialize in flatscreen TV sets, which can be assembled with the help of robots and minimal human supervision. It has been rumored that these TV sets will be Internet-connected and will be supplied to Apple, which has been planning to make a device that combines a TV screen with a computer.

The company, which was founded by Terry Gou, also has factories in Brazil and is planning to establish a smartphone factory in Indonesia by the end of this year.

Gou established what is now Foxconn in 1974 with a $7,500 capital he borrowed from his mother. The company was listed in Taipei in 1991 and its largest single plant in Shenzhen, China, employs hundreds of thousands of workers.

Source: DigiTimes, via The Guardian